Thoughts On A Sunday

BeezleBub spent the weekend split between work at the farm and his high school's FIRST robotics team...for the most part.

He tried to do some work at the farm this morning. With temps well below zero he couldn't get any of the tractors started even with the block heaters plugged in overnight. No tractors meant no work. He was home from work this morning by 9:15AM. After warming up and indulging in a couple of cups of coffee he was off to robotics for a couple of hours.

At least it keeps him off the streets.

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Today was Deb's birthday and BeezleBub and I split the cost of her birthday present: a Kindle Fire.

I think she really likes it!

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The New England Patriots pounded the Denver Broncos down in Foxboro last night, 45-10.

The Patriots face the Baltimore Ravens next weekend.

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Apparently the New Hampshire League of Women Voters didn't care very much for the voter fraud sting run by James O'Keefe's Veritas Project. From reading their reaction it appears they really didn't understand the problem O'Keefe was exposing. It doesn't help their cause that they keep repeating the oft debunked claim that requiring voter ID prior to voting will disenfranchise the poor and minorities. The poor and minorities already have to provide proof of identity for a whole host of other activities in their lives, so we have to ask why this is any different?

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As I recall a commenter on another blog (I can't remember which one) put it in perspective, stating "Our enemies behead people they don't like, including Americans. What is this compared to that?"

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I have to agree with Gerard Vanderleun on this one: "This is not a "Vote-For" election. This is a "Vote-Against" election. This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election. That is what it is about and that is all it is about." (emphasis original)

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Steven Hayward makes the case for the need for a new "Laffer Curve". The existing Laffer Curve shows the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues in the form of a non-linear parabola. While many (primarily on the Left) have criticized it, it is an accurate representation of that relationship.

What Hayward wants is a Laffer Curve that shows the effects of government regulation.

Here's where we need the regulatory equivalent of the Laffer Curve. Take the Keystone pipeline as an example. The pipeline is likely to be approved eventually, but only after more years of review and litigation. Certainly measures will need to be taken to reduce the environmental risks of the pipeline, but is there any safety measure that we will eventually impose that we didn't recognize in the first six months of the review process? It's not like we've never built a pipeline before, or learned from previous pipeline accidents (like the one in Montana last summer). Are there really any potential environmental impacts of deepening a harbor in South Carolina by five feet that require six to ten years of review and litigation, and a three-thousand page Environmental Impact Statement?

Clearly the review process we have now is largely deadweight loss, just as high marginal tax rates discouraged capital formation, investment, and productivity improvements in the high-inflation 1970s. We can arguably afford the extravagance of regulatory suffocation when the economy is booming at 4 percent growth a year or better (as in the late 1990s) and unemployment is 5 percent. We cannot afford it under the current stagnant circumstances. A Laffer Curve for regulation will explore just how much economic growth and how many jobs were are sacrificing for this artificial punctiliousness.

I think a lot of the problem can be laid at the feet of the BANANA environmentalists. (BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.) They want zero risks and want project proposals to estimate the effects of those projects up to 100 years in the future. That 'need' is an automatic loser because no one is capable of making those kind of projections.

How many needed projects will die or have died due to bureaucratic red tape foisted upon project developers for no legitimate reason other than someone somewhere didn't like it?

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the cold weather has finally arrived, the ice in the lake is starting to form, and where keeping warm is going to be costly.